Alec Huxley dabbled in painting growing up - but the rural, wooded environment on Washington state's Bainbridge Island, where he lived, didn't inspire him to pursue it seriously. Then a move to Seattle's Pioneer Square neighborhood in his early 20s changed everything.

"It provided me with settings that connected so strongly with me that picking up a paintbrush and experimenting was so easy," he says. "It started my painting journey. The combination of being surrounded by the history and architecture - and then suddenly having a big loft space to do large-scale projects in - was life changing."

Huxley, a self-taught painter who also studied photography and worked as a graphic designer, explored Pioneer Square and the adjacent South of Downtown neighborhood in the city's Industrial District. He photographed trains, freight yards, bridges, overpasses and abandoned factories. The resulting imagery expresses the often overlooked aesthetics of such subjects - for example, the stunning texture of a weathered building, shadows and a skyline reflected in a puddle of water on paved, red brick.

"My painting began with landscapes. I have an innate urge to capture the view of a place. So as I've progressed, I generally start with an environment that I've photographed and then populate it with characters," says Huxley, who also utilizes historical sources, old books and fashion magazines in his work. "Because I wasn't schooled in painting, I don't have a set process, so I've pieced together some sort of procedure based on my experience in design and printing."

Relocating to San Francisco, Huxley devoted himself fully to a fine arts career in 2009. While his canvases strongly reference urban and industrial landscapes, in rich detail and with dramatic architectural elements, they also reveal other interests. "All the Go Inbetweens," his solo exhibition at the 111 Minna Gallery, conveys his penchant for diverse subjects through two dozen black-and-white, acrylic on canvas paintings.

"There were certain types of scenery that I wanted to play with, but overall my focus was on creating works that had some sort of narrative to them. Many pieces continue on with space travel and the architecture of San Francisco," Huxley says. "Some started to home in on my fascination with the history of the American West, the desert and old mining towns. And others touched on religion and references to religious artwork."

These include men and women dressed in business attire, wearing space helmets and hovering above nighttime scenes in San Francisco. Huxley says these are about simple fantasy, film noir and the city's beautiful and haunting architecture.

"It all began when I bought a Soviet space helmet on eBay. I was playing around with a bunch of space-themed work for my first show at D-Structure and painted two pieces in that style," he says. "Something in the cinematic and graphic look just clicked with me, so I started to explore it more; next with the mural as part of the Lower Haight Mural Collective, a few other pieces for group shows, and now with this show."

Another painting features a ghostly, semitransparent barmaid observing positive and negative depictions of a gunslinger in Bodie, a gold mining ghost town, now Bodie State Historic Park.

"These go back to my fascination with buildings and the lives that intermingle with them. I would like to, but I don't really believe in ghosts," he says. "I do think that people leave imprints on spaces, and events can impart energy on a structure, so I find it compelling to overlay parts of figures on a room. I don't mean to imply that these people are dead, just a part of their energy now resides in that space."

"Alec's paintings are primarily monochromatic, and he possesses the ability to display so much depth in the contrast between two colors, both in the shadows and vast amounts of negative space," LeBrun says. "In my near 15 years in San Francisco and after being exposed to so much different art, I hadn't seen anything like it yet. Sure, it alluded to other painters I've admired in the past ... but it was obvious to me that this was a signature being carved out by an artist who spoke to me personally."

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